Writing blog for david·mayeux: fragments of novels that will never be written, poems that should never see the light of a computer monitor, thoughts & links about reading & writing.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

black marks on a white surface

ink·slinger (ĭngk'-slĭng'ər) n. Slang. - a writer

ScriptFrenzy! Day One

The Office of Letters and Light, the people who brought you NaNoWriMo, also sponsor ScriptFrenzy! in the month of April. 100 pages of script material in 30 days for a screenplay, stageplay, graphic novel, or any storytelling project that would call for a script rather than a straightforward prose manuscript. I'm participating this year, scripting an idea that I toyed with a few years ago, but got nothing down on paper.

Peregrine West while backpacking in the Blue Ridge Mountains finds himself hurled into a spiritual landscape and making a Dantean quest across the American landscape on a quest for the Holy Grail.

That's my TV Guide description. I also like to call it Dante's Divine Comedy meets David Lynch's The Straight Story which is not completely accurate, but it'll do. In the course of the adventure, he will travel through Hell, Purgatory and to the gates of Paradise and across Iowa cornfields. I had some difficulty figuring out who Peregrine's Virgil was, and then while writing the scene in which this mentor appears, it was J.R.R. Tolkien, and that fit--as he too was a writer of epics (and a translator of Grail tales). Will he remain till final version of the story? Who knows. But I like the idea of my main character running around the Allegorical Landscape in quest of the Grail with Tolkien as his guide. He'll also run into a full cast of spirits, demons, angels, saints, sinners, fellow errant "knights" and fantastical creatures.

ScriptFrenzy's goal is 3.3 pages per day to make the hundred by the end of April. After a few hours work today, I'm at 6.2 pages. The Asheville Region (ably helmed by our fantastic Municipal-Liaison Jess) holds several Write-Ins during the month when participating writers get together and ... write. There's usually some pleasantries, and a little socializing, but mostly these events are meant to be mutual encouragement and cheerleading sessions. I definitely can't do them all the time, writing is too much of a late-night alone activity for me, but it is nice to get together with people to simply BE with them and write now and again with no other expectations.

This would be my first time attempting a full-length script. During college when I took a screenwriting course, I wrote the first act of what would have been a full-length script, but that was rubbish (this will be to, but it will be rubbish slightly honed by experience). This time I'm shooting for the hundred pages in the thirty days, and I'd like to make it to a minimum 120 pgs full draft (which I'll then cut, cut, cut).

ScriptFrenzy! seems a good excuse to start this blog, which I'll use to write about writing, share my writing, and share links to interesting things that inspire my writing.

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ink·slinger

david·mayeux (n) a rhetorical ronin, a mercenary of the bon mot, and a freelancer of argot and cant. Fascinated by the way that black marks on a white surface come together to form ideas, stories and poetry, the guy likes to write.